'“The Deputy Sheriffs involved in this case followed procedure and acted appropriately,” a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said in a statement'.
Since the deputies clearly acted unconstitutionally, the logical implication of the spokesperson's statement is that the relevant procedure is illegal.
Now where have I seen a parallel case where a low-level employee acted illegally and tried to excuse his behaviour by claiming that he was simply following orders?
Because statistically speaking, he's perfectly safe. In 2014, the fatality rate for officers was.01%, or 11.1 per 100,000, and around half of those were a result of non-violent incident (accidents, both auto and being struck, illness, etc.)
One reason being a police officer is less dangerous than you might think is that they prefer to get their retaliation in first.
"Four years in a row, police nationwide fatally shoot nearly 1,000 people"
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about how Crowdstrike are supposed to have identified the attackers. But we do know that the CIA and NSA (to say nothing of other parts of the alphabet soup) have means of disguising their malicious handiwork as that of anyone else they please.
Would anyone like to suggest practical ways in which Crowdstrike could be certain about who is responsible for a given attack?
For suitable topics and students, it works better than textbooks. Maths, for instance, or electronics. Subjects that lend themselves to many detailed, specific tests with mainly right/wrong answers.
One of the most strangely neglected areas of education and computing.
But, in the real world, TEPCO cut corners to save money and the meltdown happened as it did.
That is by far the most important part of a well-informed and useful comment.
When I was a child, I thought nuclear power was God's gift to humanity. Everything I read about it looked ideal. Reactors could be designed to fail safe. With intelligent design, some reactors could run on the "waste" from other reactors. Finally, remaining waste could be put back where the original fuel was mined.
When I grew up, I met with the worst, most persistent and hideously ingenious obstacle to engineering excellence: human nature.
Before WW2, Robert A Heinlein wrote a wonderfully prophetic story about nuclear power: "Blowups Happen". It took the actual technical details of nuclear power stations for granted; the real problem lay in... human nature.
But that was where Heinlein got it badly wrong: he expected the trouble to be that those who ran and monitored nuclear power stations would rapidly have nervous breakdowns because of the huge load of responsibility and the fear that they would make some mistake. Soon, he thought, the supply of suitably qualified engineers would run out as they were all reduced to quivering jelly by the haunting fear of getting some small procedure wrong and blowing up or irradiating millions of citizens.
What actually happened in the real world was that nuclear power stations were dangerous because of hardly credible human greed, laziness, and stupidity. One nuclear power station was found to have a bubble in its concrete containing wall big enough to park a car, because the contractor had used inferior materials and rushed the process. In another well-known case, unprotected workers were carrying open buckets full of waste in unprotected areas. And so on.
Before nuclear power can be rendered as safe as it should be, we need a major upgrade to the Human Being Mark I. Or, more realistically, a far better system of incentives than "First to get $100 billion wins the game".
I mean literally, other than some oncologists, who cares?
When I need to buy food I go to the grocery store and buy whatever they have in stock that fits my budget. I don't care if it's been sprayed with glyphosate, DDT, or fairy dust. A pesticide is a pesticide is a pesticide.
How long are you planning to live? And for how many years of that would you like to experience acute, agonizing pain?
You are totally and completely fucked. There won't be enough money in existence for millions of years to cover the lawsuits you're going to lose.
You write that as if this were a desirable outcome. If what you describe happens, the corporation will go bankrupt and be dissolved. Most or all of its creditors will lose the money they are owed, and the perpetrators will go off happily with all the money they got through their vile dishonest deeds - and work for other companies.
The Chinese have a better way of dealing with criminals who cynically endanger, harm or kill other people to line their pockets.
Excrement is used on a basic food stuff, it doesn't mean it's part of a healthy and balanced diet.
Incorrect, silly man.
Excrement is sometimes used on the soil from which basic foodstuffs are grown. It is rapidly broken down by the elements and by biological soil processes. And then its component chemicals are filtered through fungi and the plants' root systems, before being built up into new chemical compounds that become basic foodstuffs.
Whereas glyphosate (and the accompanying chemicals, which together are far more harmful than glyphosate alone) are sprayed directly onto the basic foodstuffs.
Because obviously Mr Putin personally uses those backdoors every day - right from his desk in the Kremlin. It's just like the thousands of Web sites worldwide that have backdoor accounts named "Admin@Whitehouse.gov" or "Admin@CIA.gov".
By the way, I wonder who authorised this "Dutch researcher" to poke around inside 2,000 Web sites located in Russia? Imagine, if you will, that a "Russian researcher" was found to have done the same to over 2,000 sites in the USA. For further credit, try to imagine the headlines, the speeches, the bursting-with-indignation resolutions in Congress...
The much more likely calamity is that we create an artificial intelligence with the capability of learning how to destroy humanity but without the capacity to learn that it shouldn't.
That formulation is somewhat lacking. "How to destroy humanity" is an objective, factual question with no ethical content. The idea that it shouldn't be done is mainly ethical (although there is some selfish motivation too, for the AI).
Until we humans get some understanding of what our own ethical instincts are, and how they interlock with our various moral and legal codes, it would be futile to try teaching ethics to a machine.
Besides which, ethics that are imprinted or imposed are not ethical - they are commands and inhibitions.
For a computer to make ethical decisions, it would have to be absolutely free to make them in a wholly independent way. This topic is brilliantly treated in Frank Herbert's "Destination: Void" - a difficult book, but I think his best.
Try James P Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow". Not the best characterisation, or perhaps even plotting, but Hogan really knew his stuff technically. He was a computer sales engineer before he took up writing full-time, and his grasp of computing is as good as any SF author I know of.
Very early in the book there is an episode that I defy anyone to forget - ever - once read. And the core idea is also very clever, although obvious in retrospect.
Potentially scary. But also potentially useful. If we send a robot to Mars and it gets hit by a dust storm and one of its arms breaks off, we want the robot to be able to map its current physical configuration and adjust how it functions, rather than becoming a disabled, useless, multi-million dollar, pile of metal.
Why bother, when Matt Damon is available right now - and so much cheaper?
Despite repeated warnings by sci-fi authors, video games, and movie producers, scientists insist that this must happen. Even though we all know AI would probably at least rule us, at worst kill us, they keep running their experiments. Why do people who are allegedly so smart want to do something so reckless?
Because "smartness" is a highly focused trait. People can be extremely intelligent when it comes to research or engineering, but completelyunconcerned about consequences. Kurt Goedel, described by John von Neumann as the greatest logician since Leinbiz - or possibly even Aristotle - starved himself to death to avoid being poisoned by unknown agents. (Goedel was such an abstract thinker that he relied on Albert Einstein to keep him down to earth). Von Neumann himself obtained an interview with President Eisenhower, which he used to urge him to destroy the USSR with nuclear weapons before the Soviets got their own.
Maybe they think it's someone else's problem. More likely, they are thinking about the next paper, the next promotion, the next pay rise, tenure, the children's college fees, the nest egg... and of course fame and distinction.
And moreover, with 7.6 billion humans on the planet - the odds are quite good they won't be the ones to get it in the neck.
"Objectivity" is impossible to obtain by one's self.
So Newton's Laws of Motion were not objectively true until a lot of other people agreed that they were? And Archimedes' groundbreaking work in mathematics, which anticipated such 18th century advances as the integral calculus by over 1900 years, cannot have been objectively true as very few others at the time - possibly no one at all - appreciated their importance.
No explorer - especially an explorer in space or on a far planet - should ever be alone, lest her scientific judgment be hopelessly subjective.
It is worrying to reflect that Einstein's shockingly innovative ideas about relativity did not become "objective" until after they had been published. Although if that were the case, how could he have arrived at them while he was the only person in the world thinking along those lines?
"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias". - Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine". - Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness". - Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...
"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not". - John Michael Greer http://thearchdruidreport.blog...
Yes, it's essential to be realistic. Corporations are legal fictions - AIs with human components, as it's been said - and they have absolutely no conscience or morality.
Robert Heinlein once wrote something that applies perfectly to corporations:
"Never rely on a man's better nature; he may not have one".
In the case of a corporation, it hardly ever has any trace of a better nature. Just as a Terminator is interested in absolutely nothing but destroying its target, a corporation is interested in absolutely nothing but profit. (Not all of the profits may reach the shareholders, admittedly; the managers get their share).
Slashdot Mirror
'“The Deputy Sheriffs involved in this case followed procedure and acted appropriately,” a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said in a statement'.
Since the deputies clearly acted unconstitutionally, the logical implication of the spokesperson's statement is that the relevant procedure is illegal.
Now where have I seen a parallel case where a low-level employee acted illegally and tried to excuse his behaviour by claiming that he was simply following orders?
Because statistically speaking, he's perfectly safe. In 2014, the fatality rate for officers was .01%, or 11.1 per 100,000, and around half of those were a result of non-violent incident (accidents, both auto and being struck, illness, etc.)
One reason being a police officer is less dangerous than you might think is that they prefer to get their retaliation in first.
"Four years in a row, police nationwide fatally shoot nearly 1,000 people"
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Is this fake news? Because it seems like fake news.
Well, it's from the Guardian. Draw your own conclusions.
"WHY THE DNC WAS NOT HACKED BY THE RUSSIANS"
William Binney, former Technical Director NSA
Larry Johnson, former State CT and CIA
https://turcopolier.typepad.co...
As Caitlin Johnstone lucidly explains, when it comes to propaganda facts count for nothing - what you need is a good hot exciting story.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2...
I want to know where USA falls on their list.
It isn't on their list - of course. Americans would never do anything bad or harmful.
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about how Crowdstrike are supposed to have identified the attackers. But we do know that the CIA and NSA (to say nothing of other parts of the alphabet soup) have means of disguising their malicious handiwork as that of anyone else they please.
Would anyone like to suggest practical ways in which Crowdstrike could be certain about who is responsible for a given attack?
Which is the most "sophisticated state actor" you can think of, when it comes to electronic espionage and malware?
'Australia's major political parties have been targeted by a "sophisticated state actor"...'
OMG it's Putin! He's weaponized truth!!
Interactive computer instruction was implemented 60 years ago by the PLATO system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
See also "The Friendly Orange Glow"
https://www.amazon.com/Friendl...
For suitable topics and students, it works better than textbooks. Maths, for instance, or electronics. Subjects that lend themselves to many detailed, specific tests with mainly right/wrong answers.
One of the most strangely neglected areas of education and computing.
But, in the real world, TEPCO cut corners to save money and the meltdown happened as it did.
That is by far the most important part of a well-informed and useful comment.
When I was a child, I thought nuclear power was God's gift to humanity. Everything I read about it looked ideal. Reactors could be designed to fail safe. With intelligent design, some reactors could run on the "waste" from other reactors. Finally, remaining waste could be put back where the original fuel was mined.
When I grew up, I met with the worst, most persistent and hideously ingenious obstacle to engineering excellence: human nature.
Before WW2, Robert A Heinlein wrote a wonderfully prophetic story about nuclear power: "Blowups Happen". It took the actual technical details of nuclear power stations for granted; the real problem lay in... human nature.
But that was where Heinlein got it badly wrong: he expected the trouble to be that those who ran and monitored nuclear power stations would rapidly have nervous breakdowns because of the huge load of responsibility and the fear that they would make some mistake. Soon, he thought, the supply of suitably qualified engineers would run out as they were all reduced to quivering jelly by the haunting fear of getting some small procedure wrong and blowing up or irradiating millions of citizens.
What actually happened in the real world was that nuclear power stations were dangerous because of hardly credible human greed, laziness, and stupidity. One nuclear power station was found to have a bubble in its concrete containing wall big enough to park a car, because the contractor had used inferior materials and rushed the process. In another well-known case, unprotected workers were carrying open buckets full of waste in unprotected areas. And so on.
Before nuclear power can be rendered as safe as it should be, we need a major upgrade to the Human Being Mark I. Or, more realistically, a far better system of incentives than "First to get $100 billion wins the game".
There is no reason to believe anything that came out of Fukushima.
And why would we believe anything that comes out of a fact-free source such as you?
btw gasoline is not safe.
More accurately: energy is not safe. The more of it there is, and the denser it is, the more unsafe.
Who cares?
I mean literally, other than some oncologists, who cares?
When I need to buy food I go to the grocery store and buy whatever they have in stock that fits my budget. I don't care if it's been sprayed with glyphosate, DDT, or fairy dust. A pesticide is a pesticide is a pesticide.
How long are you planning to live? And for how many years of that would you like to experience acute, agonizing pain?
Is it ok if Monsanto is only poisoning farmers?
If the overall risk is lower than using alternative herbicides, then yes.
How, I wonder, did human beings raise crops for thousands of years before herbicides, insecticides and artificial fertilizers were invented?
I only ask because I want to know.
Dear Monsanto,
You are totally and completely fucked. There won't be enough money in existence for millions of years to cover the lawsuits you're going to lose.
You write that as if this were a desirable outcome. If what you describe happens, the corporation will go bankrupt and be dissolved. Most or all of its creditors will lose the money they are owed, and the perpetrators will go off happily with all the money they got through their vile dishonest deeds - and work for other companies.
The Chinese have a better way of dealing with criminals who cynically endanger, harm or kill other people to line their pockets.
They put them against a wall and shoot them.
Excrement is used on a basic food stuff, it doesn't mean it's part of a healthy and balanced diet.
Incorrect, silly man.
Excrement is sometimes used on the soil from which basic foodstuffs are grown. It is rapidly broken down by the elements and by biological soil processes. And then its component chemicals are filtered through fungi and the plants' root systems, before being built up into new chemical compounds that become basic foodstuffs.
Whereas glyphosate (and the accompanying chemicals, which together are far more harmful than glyphosate alone) are sprayed directly onto the basic foodstuffs.
See the difference now?
Because obviously Mr Putin personally uses those backdoors every day - right from his desk in the Kremlin. It's just like the thousands of Web sites worldwide that have backdoor accounts named "Admin@Whitehouse.gov" or "Admin@CIA.gov".
By the way, I wonder who authorised this "Dutch researcher" to poke around inside 2,000 Web sites located in Russia? Imagine, if you will, that a "Russian researcher" was found to have done the same to over 2,000 sites in the USA. For further credit, try to imagine the headlines, the speeches, the bursting-with-indignation resolutions in Congress...
The much more likely calamity is that we create an artificial intelligence with the capability of learning how to destroy humanity but without the capacity to learn that it shouldn't.
That formulation is somewhat lacking. "How to destroy humanity" is an objective, factual question with no ethical content. The idea that it shouldn't be done is mainly ethical (although there is some selfish motivation too, for the AI).
Until we humans get some understanding of what our own ethical instincts are, and how they interlock with our various moral and legal codes, it would be futile to try teaching ethics to a machine.
Besides which, ethics that are imprinted or imposed are not ethical - they are commands and inhibitions.
For a computer to make ethical decisions, it would have to be absolutely free to make them in a wholly independent way. This topic is brilliantly treated in Frank Herbert's "Destination: Void" - a difficult book, but I think his best.
Try James P Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow". Not the best characterisation, or perhaps even plotting, but Hogan really knew his stuff technically. He was a computer sales engineer before he took up writing full-time, and his grasp of computing is as good as any SF author I know of.
Very early in the book there is an episode that I defy anyone to forget - ever - once read. And the core idea is also very clever, although obvious in retrospect.
Potentially scary. But also potentially useful. If we send a robot to Mars and it gets hit by a dust storm and one of its arms breaks off, we want the robot to be able to map its current physical configuration and adjust how it functions, rather than becoming a disabled, useless, multi-million dollar, pile of metal.
Why bother, when Matt Damon is available right now - and so much cheaper?
Despite repeated warnings by sci-fi authors, video games, and movie producers, scientists insist that this must happen. Even though we all know AI would probably at least rule us, at worst kill us, they keep running their experiments. Why do people who are allegedly so smart want to do something so reckless?
Because "smartness" is a highly focused trait. People can be extremely intelligent when it comes to research or engineering, but completelyunconcerned about consequences. Kurt Goedel, described by John von Neumann as the greatest logician since Leinbiz - or possibly even Aristotle - starved himself to death to avoid being poisoned by unknown agents. (Goedel was such an abstract thinker that he relied on Albert Einstein to keep him down to earth). Von Neumann himself obtained an interview with President Eisenhower, which he used to urge him to destroy the USSR with nuclear weapons before the Soviets got their own.
Maybe they think it's someone else's problem. More likely, they are thinking about the next paper, the next promotion, the next pay rise, tenure, the children's college fees, the nest egg... and of course fame and distinction.
And moreover, with 7.6 billion humans on the planet - the odds are quite good they won't be the ones to get it in the neck.
"Objectivity" is impossible to obtain by one's self.
So Newton's Laws of Motion were not objectively true until a lot of other people agreed that they were? And Archimedes' groundbreaking work in mathematics, which anticipated such 18th century advances as the integral calculus by over 1900 years, cannot have been objectively true as very few others at the time - possibly no one at all - appreciated their importance.
No explorer - especially an explorer in space or on a far planet - should ever be alone, lest her scientific judgment be hopelessly subjective.
It is worrying to reflect that Einstein's shockingly innovative ideas about relativity did not become "objective" until after they had been published. Although if that were the case, how could he have arrived at them while he was the only person in the world thinking along those lines?
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
John P. A. Ioannidis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Further reading:
"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias".
- Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".
- Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness".
- Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...
"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not".
- John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blog...
Yes, it's essential to be realistic. Corporations are legal fictions - AIs with human components, as it's been said - and they have absolutely no conscience or morality.
Robert Heinlein once wrote something that applies perfectly to corporations:
"Never rely on a man's better nature; he may not have one".
In the case of a corporation, it hardly ever has any trace of a better nature. Just as a Terminator is interested in absolutely nothing but destroying its target, a corporation is interested in absolutely nothing but profit. (Not all of the profits may reach the shareholders, admittedly; the managers get their share).